Edinburgh has perfected the art of the summer literary festival. This year's, the 21st, focused on religious faith and ideology, reports Helen Meany
The first thing to figure out was whether it was better be in the Writers' Retreat or the Authors' Yurt. Luckily, Alain de Botton was on hand with his new book on status anxiety, which was some help, although it didn't seem to address the subject of yurts. It was pretty clear where members of the press fitted in: we were consigned to a "pod". Inside Charlotte Square Gardens, in Edinburgh's Georgian New Town, long orderly queues criss-crossed the encampment of white tents as people patiently licked ice-cream cones and waited for the next "show" to begin. After the readings, audiences formed more queues to buy the authors' books, before queuing again to have them signed.
After 21 years the rituals of the summer literary festival have been well honed by the organisers of Edinburgh International Book Festival. In a city exploding with artistic life each August this seemed a self-contained world, somewhere between a theme park and a playpen. Participants in need of a bit of emotional support could attend a session on self-esteem for writers; those with fantasies of world domination were catered for by Partha Bose, whose new book presents leadership tips gleaned from the "revolutionary strategies" of Alexander the Great that have "direct relevance to today's business leaders". If that was all too energetic, there were discussions about the slow movement - which is no longer just about food - and the importance of doing nothing, or, at least, doing much less. Willing Slaves, the recent book by the Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting on Britain's overwork culture, touched a nerve. Along the same lines, the Scottish journalist Pat Kane's forthcoming book is called The Play Ethic, although it's hard to know how seriously to take someone who has just set up a consultancy firm called New Integrity.
This is the kind of language ("Orwellian Blair speak") that makes the Scottish author and journalist Neal Ascherson squirm, as he made clear in his lecture to an enthusiastic audience on the future of democracy. It was a surprisingly optimistic, upbeat presentation, possibly a reaction, in part, to what he sees as the negative coverage in the Scottish media of the new Scottish Executive. Certainly, people are disillusioned with politics, he says, but that doesn't mean democracy is in danger; it's politicians who are in danger. The problem lies with democratic institutions, he argued.
"State power has been abandoned to quangos and the private sector, and elected governments do much less that actually affects people's lives. Democracy flowers when it has something to do but withers when it becomes a ritual. The essence and substance of democracy is equality - and this is the instinct that cannot be beaten out of human beings."
There was one event held in conjunction with Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre: the Scottish theatre critic Joyce McMillan chaired a lively discussion between the Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh and the Scottish playwright and director David Grieg, whose adaptation of Shehadeh's memoir When The Bulbul Stopped Singing was running at the Traverse. Apart from this, there were few bridgeheads to the city's other festivals.
For the novelist Howard Jacobson this was probably just as well. Having declared that plays are inane, he was unlikely to be seen anywhere near a fringe show - although he did make an exception for Shakespeare.
Not all of the participating writers seemed comfortable with the phenomenon of literature as entertainment, although some, such as the novelist A. L. Kennedy, approached it with grim determination. Her early-morning appearance in the Wake Up to Words slot came close to a sit-down comedy routine, complete with self-deprecating one-liners. But when she read later from her new novel, Paradise, her diffidence disappeared. She gave passionate life to the voice of her female narrator, a chronic alcoholic: "The world is impossibly wrong and I am not forewarned, forearmed."
Catherine Lockerbie, the festival's director, has broadened its programme over the past few years to include debate about ideas, current affairs, history, politics and society, and authors of non-fiction were given as much prominence as novelists and poets. One of the main strands of the programme was concerned with aspects of faith and ideology, focusing on Western attitudes to Islam; on Christianity, including a new book by the historian Karen Liebreich on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the 17th century; on the rise of fundamentalism, with forays into the origins of the Middle Eastern conflict; and on, inevitably, to US foreign policy, the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
Perspectives from the past century were included, with a reading by Eva Hoffman from After Such Knowledge, her superb book on the legacy of the Holocaust, and from David Cesarani, whose biography of Adolf Eichmann has just been published. Choosing his words scrupulously, he stressed the gradual development of Eichmann's anti-Semitism and his conventional, comfortable childhood in Rhineland, suggesting that the path towards genocide was not pre-determined. In his early years as a Nazi Eichmann was involved in organising the deportation of Jews, and he was initially revolted by the killings he witnessed. A few years later he had become hardened to them - a warning, Cesarani said, about "Everyman as génocidaire".
Cesarani's characterisation of Eichmann as rotten to the core by the end of the second World War is not one that the English religious historian and commentator Karen Armstrong would accept. "Actions may be evil but not people," she said in a wide-ranging, witty presentation in which she summarised the spiritual journey she has undertaken since leaving a convent in the 1970s. Referring to her formation in two abrasive institutions, the convent and Oxford, she confessed: "I used to be a really unpleasant person, with a very sharp tongue." The latest volume of her memoirs, The Spiral Staircase, takes up the story of her post-convent life, the depression she suffered for many years and the series of career setbacks, failures and rejections on her path to becoming a world authority on comparative religion. The author of, among other books, A History Of God and Mohammed: A Biography Of The Prophet, she has become, since September 11th, 2001, a regular visitor to the US, where she introduces politicians and other public figures to the essentials of Islam.
The common ground of all world religions is the recognition of the importance of compassion, she has concluded. Rather than faith, theology or metaphysics, the capacity "to feel with others" is the prime religious virtue, and those who practise it will be changed by it. "Compassion means you dethrone yourself from the centre of your world."
Jeannette Winterson spoke in very similar terms about the need to overcome our solipsism through connection with others and the quest for love that informs everything she writes. This is one novelist who has no difficulty with the requirement to be a public performer. As she described them in her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, her formative years as a teenage evangelical speaker in northern England have obviously stood to her: she was remarkably charismatic, standing, hands on hips, addressing the packed 570-seat tent for an hour without notes, speaking eloquently about the importance of the imagination and of the space that art creates in a "noisy, trivial world". "I stalk life from every angle," she declared.
Her restlessness is reflected in her approach to writing novels. "I'm not interested in the 19th-century monolithic narrative. You have to push the form forward, inch by inch, and that isn't easy. We need to find new ways of telling stories, because life changes. Art responds to new situations. It lives in a perpetual present and connects us to the past.
"We don't think in straight lines: our mental processes are curved, are mazes. If you write with your conscious mind only, imposing order, what you will get is only high-class journalism, not art, which is dangerous and mysterious. It's the difference between acts of will and acts of imagination."
The queue for her to sign books afterwards snaked out of the tent onto the square outside. Most people were buying her novel The Passion, as if by taking it home between covers some of it might seep out and change their lives.
